Mao in Cuba

Here's a paper I wrote in grad school where I used the mass-line and united front logic as a methodology to analyze left elements in Cuba at the time of the revolution. Check it out!

Introduction

The Cuban Revolution has taken on a lot of different meanings for different groups in America and the World. For anti-communists, some Cubans, some communists, and many Americans, the Cuban Revolution was representative of a violent man and his soldiers replacing Batista with another violent dictatorship. For different communists and different parts of the American public, the Cuban Revolution represented a mighty people ending an oppressive regime. It’s normal for people from different walks of life to relate to an event or period in different ways; sociology makes this very evident. In the period leading up to the Cuban revolution, the different groups, classes, and professions in Cuba had their own relationship and perspective to the social process of political struggle taking place on the island. 

Sometimes, our understanding of the left in Cuba at the time of the Revolution doesn’t go beyond the armed insurgents, and even when we are less gracious, we may only go as far as to think that the armed insurgents were able to politically motivate apolitical people enough to win against Batista. When we outline the Cuban Revolution in either of these ways, we leave out the rich web of left organizations and worker politics that had already made up parts of Cuban society in the 1950s. Further, these ways of thinking also leave out the way those left organizations, workers, intelligentsia, and elements of the middle class aligned or rejected those armed insurgents in the period leading up to the revolution. By using Mao Tse Tung’s and the Communist Party of China’s United Front strategy as a theoretical methodology, this paper explores the relationships that different left forces and social elements had to the armed insurgents in the Sierra Maestra, so that we can better understand their agency and presence in the story of the Cuban revolution. 

The United Front as an Analytical Tool

For people on the left, it can be difficult to imagine what it looks to win or to stop being a political group on the margins of society. For those groups, it may be obvious that becoming more popular and aligning with others over a shared left vision will only come about through interactions with the masses and other groups, but it’s an open question as to how to go about doing so, and which ways will be the most conducive to a long political struggle. In the second Japanese Invasion of China at the end of the 1930s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and other aligned left forces were not large enough to take on the Japanese by themselves and win. Further, the CPC was already in a long political struggle against the anti-communist nationalist party known as the Kuomintang (KMT). Since they were caught between both the Japanese invasion and the KMT, the CPC had to develop a strategy on how to move more people towards the cause of fighting the Japanese while also shifting any political power away from the KMT so that they could stop being killed by them (Schram 1977:223). The CPC developed the strategy known as the United Front to work towards both goals at the same time. Still, that strategy only started being implemented once it was politically necessary to do so; some CPC writings remark on the relative strength of the Kuomintang as a military army able to fight the Japanese (Schram 1977:228).

The United Front consists of three relational distinctions between social forces in a social environment. The first is the advanced, or the left elements that share similar goals and already are in the struggle for a socialist pole within the social environment. The second is the intermediate, or the elements of people who are not politically motivated towards socialism and may also lack political coherence. The intermediate can also consist of sections of the bourgeoisie that vacillate in their relationship towards political sides and trade unions that are not a part of left groups (Schram 1977:223). The third distinction is the backwards, or the elements often on the right but sometimes the center that parrot the reactionary or anti-communist rhetoric deployed against the advance (Schram 1977:310). Regardless of their rhetoric, the “backwards” groups are still included in the United Front because of their relationship to the masses and the interests that they have opposite the prevailing enemy, in this case the Japanese. In this historical period, the national bourgeoisie and the people belonging to the KMT made up much of the group characterized as backwards. The backwards also exert political influence on those in the intermediate. 

There is a strong influence of dialectical thinking present in this strategic orientation; winning over the intermediate towards the cause of socialism in the struggle against the Japanese can isolate the backwards’ political influence on the masses and the intermediate. The United Front strategy is like the idea that one should unite their friends to split their enemies, instead of splitting their friends and ending up uniting their enemies. Although the KMT had strong anti-communist tendencies, didn’t agree with ideological orientation of the CPC, and was presently murdering elements of the CPC that it could find, the CPC for a period did work with or make peace with elements of the KMT because of their shared interest in Chinese independence from Japan, and because there wasn’t enough political coherence among left forces yet to meaningful fight reactionary forces and come out on top (Schram 1977:227). A clear theme across this explanation is one of pragmatism and an analysis over which political actions are presently possible versus which are possible more in the future when social circumstances change. The United Front is meant to be an objective analysis of different groups’ and classes’ relationship to a prevailing enemy and the influence that those different groups have on the political environment, rather than a more subjective characterization of which groups make up the left (Schram 1977:225); still, the purpose of this analysis was to work towards creating a real and living United Front against the Japanese imperial forces, so it is the case that this objective determination through investigation of present social circumstances eventually became a subjective discussion around allies and enemies. 

This type of analysis realizes that the struggle for cultural hegemony and political power involves relating to different existing institutions, classes, and factions to form strategic coalitions that can accomplish shared political objectives. This analysis also considers that over the course of a political struggle and the rising tensions that ensue, the perspective of certain groups may change regarding political action and alliances with others in the area. The strategic orientation of organizations within a political struggle can be very sociological, because orientations can consider the idea that social groups are not static and social processes can transform the way that groups relate to new political developments. This is what interested me greatly about the 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte because I felt that Marx was doing a case study of how different elements of social classes related to that shifting political environment, and why that historical turn didn’t result in the development of a stronger left in France (1852). 

The mass-line stands as the Leninist logic employed by the Communists in the United Front to unite the advanced and win over the intermediate. In a directive to the Communist Party of China during the Second Japanese invasion, Mao Tse Tung writes that “there are two methods which must be employed in whatever work we do. One is to combine the general with the particular, the other is to combine the leadership with the masses” (Schram 1977:315). Here is the reason for one of the Little Red Book’s most famous quotes where Mao says, “No investigation, no right to speak”. In communications around the Chinese Communists use of the mass-line in political struggle, he explains that although as communists we may understand certain structural issues about our environments and how to move forward in the resolution of those issues, our pursuit of these resolutions will fail if we do not first investigate the relationship that different parts of the masses have towards those ideas and the present capacity of those parts to work towards social change, because only after investigation of those circumstances can we make good decisions (Schram 1977:315) For the CPC, political change could only happen if the masses began to cohere around a political line (developed through investigation) that the masses agreed with and could thus be mobilized towards. This is obviously a dialectical political struggle that plays out over a period time, rather than something the communists get right in their first attempt, because the socialist pursuits of those on the fringes of society can frequently alienate and fail to capture those that have a different sense of politics. Under this orientation, the communists must work from the social and ideological position of where the masses are at and move them in a political struggle to how far they are willing to go. Because there has often been a historical and timely necessity in communists attempting to move the masses towards political action, it’s also a serious possibility that the communists can completely fail to create a political line that moves the masses and instead concede the political moment to reactionary elements. 

The party communists in China employed the mass-line in their relationship to other advanced left forces throughout the second Japanese invasion to cohere more of a socialist pole within this political struggle, while also using the mass-line to determine which political and economic reforms could win over groups of people within the intermediate like the peasantry, the workers, and sections of the middle class. Using the model that I’ve now defined surrounding the strategic orientation of the United Front and the related strategy of the mass-line, I will now juxtapose this analytical framing onto the political environment of different groups in Cuba leading up to the Cuban Revolution to investigate the development of the anti-colonial United Front that eventually ran Batista off the island. The hope is that this juxtaposition illuminates our understanding of social movements as sociologists and makes less shallow our understanding of different political organizations and classes over the course of a political struggle. 

Cuba

The Armed Insurgents (M-26-7)

The Granma Expedition in 1956 involved 82 men led by Fidel Castro riding by boat from Mexico to Cuba to begin an armed insurgency on the island (Anderson 2010). Batista’s forces had been expecting their arrival and the insurgents were quickly met with gunfire from the air and on the ground (Anderson 2010). The 21 men that survived fled into the Sierra Maestra to regroup, while the rest of the original 82 were either killed or captured (Anderson 2010). There in the Sierra Maestra is where the M-26-7’s contribution to the Cuban Revolution truly began, with the insurgents using strategies of Guerilla Warfare to attack military barracks and relate to peasants in the country side through the process of armed struggle. 

Left elements within Cuba like the Partido Socialist Popular (PSP) - Cuba’s Communist Party - during this time frequently characterized the M-26-7 as petite bourgeois and a part of the middle class (Ruiz: 1968:14, Suchlicki 1969:87). In a public statement put out by the PSP in the early period of the armed insurgency on the island, they refer to the M-26-7 as “expeditions from abroad” (Suchlicki 1967:87), highlighting the feeling that some left elements in Cuba shared around M-26-7 being an instigative, escalatory, insular, and adventurist group. In his final letter to his parents before his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara even described himself as an adventurer, except for him he was “one of a different sort – one of those who risks his skin to prove his truths,” (Guevara 1968: 142). Fidel’s politicization as a person also had very much to do with the period of his life as a university student in Cuba, highlighting his relationship to the middle class (Suchlicki 1968: 52). 

Overall, those elements of the left that levied these critiques against the M-26-7 sound fairly justified in their claims about the movement’s relationship to the left in Cuba. In one of the videos available on YouTube from the era of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel remarks that for revolutionaries, armed struggle is not the road that they have chosen, but the road that the imperialists and the oligarchy of Cuba has chosen for them (Thomas 2013). When we take Fidel’s logical conclusion here through the frame of the Mass-line that we developed earlier in the paper, it's easy to understand this statement as an escalation of the social and combat tensions in Cuba, at a time where other left forces or the popular masses of Cuba were not yet prepared for such an escalation. It’s here that we can highlight some of the problematic tendencies that come about during a revolutionary situation, because although it’s clear that armed insurgencies can have clear political impacts to systems of government, insurgencies may only become meaningfully “left” or “progressive” in the relationship that the movement cultivates to other social movements and left groups already embedded in that society. After all, the post-colonial period is famous for armed insurgencies and political assassinations of sitting presidents or possible candidates, but by reactionary forces. 

Ruiz writes about the incoherent political character of many of the Guerillas, which parallels his feelings on the political incoherence of many strata of the professional and middle classes in Cuba. For Ruiz, “no homogenous middle class or national bourgeoise existed, while the welfare of both the middle-class sectors and the sugar barons depended on the United States,” (Ruiz 1968:15). Castro didn’t publicly announce his Marxist-Leninist political orientation until after the Cuban Revolution was victorious (Ruiz 1968:5), and although it can be presumed that he was a communist throughout the armed insurgency, it does make sense to characterize M-26-7 as a movement born under the idea of Cuban Nationalism, but a type of anti-colonial nationalism like that of Jose Martí decades earlier. This nationalist movement had the clearest intentions to fight the Cuban military and halt the government, which was a political orientation and strategy that could eventually prove very helpful in a popular front for a socialist revolution on the island.

Although M-26-7 related to the social elements in the Sierra Maestra throughout their political struggle, the rural peasantry didn’t consistently join the ranks of the armed insurgents until late in 1958, but they did sometimes supply the insurgents with food during the insurgents’ time in the Sierra Maestra (Ruiz 1968:14). For Ruiz, Fidel’s promises for agrarian reform in 1958 were what motivated the rural peasantry towards action (1968:15)

The University Students

When General Fulgencio Batista successfully launched a military coup in 1952 and took dictatorial power, the organization of students at the University of Havana known as the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, or FEU, was one of the first groups to protest his regime (Suchlicki 1969:58). Although many university students had opposed the previous president known as Carlos Prió because of his relationship to the corruption of Cuban politics, they still wanted the reinstitution of Carlos Prió because he had at least been a part of a constitutional government (Suchlicki:61); they event went as far as to put the 1940 Constitution in a coffin and carry it around Havana as a part of a four day funeral procession for democracy in Cuba (Suchlicki:62). It’s worth noting that Fidel’s failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 was organized by a faction of the Orthodoxos party, which was a main political party that greatly influenced the university students and consistently denounced the Batista regime (Suchlicki 1969:61,62).

Since it was the university students that were very vocal and creative about their opposition to the Batista government, they were often the category of people most brutalized in Cuba by the regime. This fact, combined with the University of Havana being located within the country’s capital, meant that that their politicization process against Batista happened quickly (Suchlicki:58-70). By 1955, left elements among the students felt that they had exhausted all nonpartisan possibilities in the struggle against Batista, so they formed the Directorio Revoluciónario as a clandestine insurrectionary organization to transform their struggle within the urban areas of Cuba (Suchlicki:71). This logic does indeed mirror the point that Fidel makes about armed struggle in the video I described earlier, as the students are seemingly choosing the only option that they understand after being so brutalized by the dictatorship, but the organization’s political line around tyrannicide and the assassination of Batista and his cabinet was met with rejection by M-26-7 in the Sierra Maestra and other left elements in Cuba (Suchlicki 1969:73,82). Both Fidel and the PSP publicly denounced the bombing of the presidential palace that the Directorio Revoluciónario conducted. 

Even though the DR did such radical and violent efforts to overthrow the government, they were still firmly in favor of a new constitutional government, and not the solidification of socialism on the island (Suchlicki 1969:72). In fact, there were several organizations that sprouted up in the years after 1956 that had strategies of assassination of Batista and the overthrow of the government as their means, but still expressed the reinstitution of the constitutional government as the end goal (Suchlicki 1969:76) So resolute in their opposition to socialism, after a long period of violent struggle where their president was murdered, the DR elected a woman as president of their organization, only to remove her from her position once it was discovered she had been to Czechoslovakia and was a communist (Suchlicki 1969:84). Their ideological position makes them interesting additions to the anti-colonial united front developing on the island. The ideological pursuits of assassination and government overthrow does make out to be would-be companions to other left elements within the united front, but Fidel and the PSP did show consistent trepidations about the character of the DR and other radical organizations’ actions. Although Suchlicki suggests that Fidel discredited the student leaders and their organization because he saw them as competitors in his quest for power (1969:75) - which could be partly the case - the PSP’s rejection of the actions done by those same organizations makes me wonder if both the M-26-7 and the PSP opposed the assassination and overthrow of the government because there wasn’t yet a national coherence among these movements and that the premature version of a social revolution was an unfavorable outcome. In this case, perhaps M-26-7 and the PSP saw the insurrectionary groups as politically intermediate and sought to win the groups over to the idea of a socialist alternative to the constitutional government that they desired. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution had been won and the M-26-7 became the official tendency of the new government, Fidel let in several activists, student leaders, and communists from both the DR and the PSP into the government to be ministers, ambassadors, and cabinet members (Suchlicki 1969:88,89). 

Labor and the PSP

Earlier in the paper, I mentioned that the PSP had denounced the M-26-7 as the “expeditions from abroad,” because they had a nonexistent relationship to the social currents on the island. The PSP believed in a mass struggle based primarily on the mobilization of the proletariat that led towards national elections, and they advocated for a United Front of National Liberation to form a government representing workers, peasants, urban petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie (Suchlicki 1969:82). Still, the PSP held private discussions with both M-26-7 and the insurrectionary DR aligned groups attempting to assassinate Bautista, although their conversations often went nowhere. One of the most famous occurrences of these failed engagements was when Fidel and the M-26-7 called for a general strike in April 1958 after communicating with the PSP, which as an organization had distinct connections to portions of organized labor in Cuba. (Franqui 1979:297) Organized labor didn’t act, largely because Batista had cultivated a relationship with them on the island in the past few years, but also because the PSP chose to sabotage the strike because they had come to an agreement with the M-26-7 when they had met (Ruiz 1968:132). Famously, a general strike never occurred when M-26-7 called for them in the period leading up to the Cuban Revolution, but a large strike on the island did occur when Frank País, an underground leader of the M-26-7 in Santiago, was murdered by police in July 1957 (Ruiz 1968, Suchlicki 1969). Between this event and the fact that the anti-colonial front didn’t really have real political coherence as a movement, it seems as if the escalation of social tensions and state repression by the Batista regime also worked to ruin the complacency of the masses and make it more likely for moments of solidarity to occur, regardless of political unity. 

The Communists in Cuba had a strange relationship to Batista in the decades leading up to the Cuban Revolution. They weren’t very brutalized by the Batista regime prior to the murder of País (Suchlicki 1969); that title still belonged to the insurrectionary student groups of the DR. Batista let publicly open communists into specific governmental positions regarding agriculture and the sugar sector of the economy, in an effort to improve his relationship with labor organizations, even as he outlawed the communist party in Cuba (Ruiz:132). The Communist Party led several general strikes in the country during the 1930s and was a part of the political struggles leading up to the 1940s, but the Batista regime’s cooptation of key communists and his subsequent outlawing of them warped the role of organized labor as a part of the political struggle leading up to the Cuban Revolution. Ruiz also writes that the urban workers in the time leading up to the Cuban Revolution were not experiencing “intolerable levels of poverty,” so there was less cause for them to become political motivated over the course of the political struggle (1968:14). 

An Assessment of the Anti-Colonial Front in Cuba

I believe there’s a deep dialectical relationship between the 1940 Constitution, the subsequent constitutional government under Batista and other presidents, and the composition of the social forces leading up to the Cuban Revolution. Although it’s easy for leftists in the current day to critique those insurrectionary groups trying to assassinate Batista for wanting to reinstitute the constitutional government instead of instituting a more socialist alternative, one must remember that the creation of the constitutional government on the island was its own political struggle that left forces and organized labor participated in. Fidel’s participation in the FEU’s attempt to spur a general strike on the island during the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 only makes this point more interesting. With the armed insurgency beginning only three years later and only one year after Fidel’s release from jail, the armed insurgency from the Sierra Maestra could be understood as a direct reproduction of the Moncada Barracks attack, but with a different access to resources and a more fleshed out military strategy.

For a second, let’s consider Fidel and his armed insurgents anti-colonial nationalists, rather than communists, because of Fidel’s public declaration of his Marxism-Leninism only occurring after the Cuban Revolution, and because the idea for the armed insurgency developed out of the attempted attack on the Moncada Barracks, which was an attack that was planned during the groups participation in a youthful student environment whose members also held a funeral procession for the 1940 Constitution. Further, let’s also consider the later insurrectionary student groups like the DR as anti-colonial nationalists, because they wanted to reinstitute the constitutional government. Both the armed insurgents and these insurrectionary groups make up a large part of the anti-colonial front, but if we are to juxtapose our classical understanding of the United Front onto this anti-colonial one, then we are clearly missing the communists, organized labor, and the peasantry. 

If we hold the armed insurgents under less ideological scrutiny and come to the very likely conclusion that Fidel and the rest of the M-26-7 withheld the declaration of their political philosophy from the public until it was politically expedient to do so, then we still don’t see a notable difference in the number of Communists within the United Front, and the presence of organized labor is still nonexistent. This, combined with the fact that there were several general strikes organized by communists in the political struggle throughout the 1930s and none in the period leading up to the Cuban Revolution, makes a few points.  

The first is that the 1930s and Batista’s time as leader of the constitutional government and subsequent military coup in 1952 were politically corrosive for Labor’s and Communists’ relationship to social movements and political struggle in Cuba. Because of what seems like political burnout or apathy, those groups were not capable allies to the anti-colonial front in the political struggle against Batista. This means that anti-colonial front’s strongest members were the anti-colonial nationalists in the urban areas, the armed insurgents, and the urban people facing near constant political repression by police forces in the years leading up to the Cuban revolution. For this reason, the political repression of the masses in Cuba may have done more for the passing of the revolution that we realize. This contextualization of the anti-colonial front isn’t meant to ignore the contributions from the PSP, the remaining communists, the intellectuals, or whatever labor union eventually decided to participate in and support the Cuban Revolution, but in my personal assessment of the Cuban political environment at the time, those forces seemed one-off or insular in their relationship to the anti-colonial front.

The juxtaposition of the United Front Model onto the Cuban context shows that the Cuban revolution was a very different type of struggle than the one the CPC dealt with during the second Japanese invasion of China. The United Front in China against the Japanese was focused on cohering a socialist pole among the advanced and intermediate forces in China to win people away from the KMT while also creating a strong anti-colonial national coherence against the Japanese. The anti-colonial front in Cuba wasn’t explicitly communist or socialist, but they were explicitly focused on consolidating popular elements behind the idea that Bautista needed to be overthrown. In the years after the Cuban Revolution, Cuba would go on to have a deep relationship with the Soviet Union, and with new socialist governments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. 

I find it very interesting for there to be such a non-communist contingent (speaking about the student factions here) in the political struggle that led to the creation of a communist country. For this reason, I wonder if M-26-7’s original plans were to reinstitute a constitutional government on their own anti-colonial terms once the hegemony of the island had shifted, and if the later communist character of the new government instead came about from a combination of the individual political inclinations of the Guerillas in the Sierra Maestra, the process of national liberation against capitalist and imperial forces, the anti-communist rhetorical and physical attacks by the United States, and their economic relationship to a multi-polar world. 

References

Anderson, Jon L. 2010. Che: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press.

Franqui, Carlos. 1976. Diary of the Cuban Revolution translated by Georgette Feliz, Elaine Kerrigan, Phyllis Freeman, and Hardie St. Martin. New York: Viking Press.

Guevara, Che. 1967. “Letter to his Parents”. Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings edited by George Lavan. New York: Grove Press.

Marx, Karl. 1852 “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”

Ruiz, Ramon Eduardo. 1968. Cuba: The Making of a Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton and Company

Schram, Stuart. 1977. The Political Thought of Mao Tse Tung. New York: Praeger Publishers. 

Suchlicki, Jaime. 1969. University Students and Revolution in Cuba, 1920-1968. Miami: University of Miami Press.

Thomas, Jimmy. [Username]. 2013, November 9. “Fidel Castro Interview. Guerilla Revolution” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z3PYs7XFMI